Often on this blog, I have reminded you that there are no talent scouts.  The movie studios and TV networks are not now, nor have they ever been, on a desperate nationwide search for new talent.  The manufactured myths of American Idol aside, Hollywood is not looking for sexy singers, pretty actresses, hard-charging producers, visionary directors or even clever sitcom writers.  They don’t need to look for these people.  Those people are already here. 

Ten thousand incredibly talented people, more talented people than Hollywood will need for the next twenty years, are camped outside of the studio gates at this very moment.  (If you come to Hollywood, the people that you literally see camped out in front of the studio gates are actually in line to see Ellen DeGeneres or The Price Is Right.  When I say “camped,” I mean that metaphorically.  The talented people already live here.  They can show up for a studio audition or a network pitch meeting in ten minutes if their agent calls.)

So where do TV sitcom writers really come from?

Let me rummage through my memory and give you a short background on some of the writers that I worked with when I was writing and producing network TV sitcoms.

On my first TV writing staff, one of the older writers had been an actor on radio when he was a kid.  He kept acting when he grew up, but when that got frustrating he tried his hand at writing.  Since he knew a lot of people in show business already, he was able to talk friends into hiring him as a writer.  He acted sometimes and wrote sometimes and made a decent living at it for many years.

One of the other writers on that first TV writing staff started out writing the celebrity ad-libs on game shows.  (I hope it won’t come as too big a shock to you that celebrities don’t actually think up those clever things that they say to Bonnie Hunt or David Letterman.  That stuff is written for them by professional writers.)  Through connections that this game-show writer made at the TV networks, he worked his way into sitcom. 

Another writer was the step-son of a well-known TV writer.  One writer was the girlfriend of the step-son of another well-known TV and movie writer.  Another woman was the daughter of a well-known writer.

I once worked for a writer/producer who had started out as a trumpet player for a popular singer.  He pitched jokes to the singer.  The singer liked the jokes and used them in his act.  The trumpet player started making more money selling jokes to singers than from blowing his horn.  He eventually got a job writing for TV when one of these singers landed a prime time variety show.  When variety shows disappeared, the trumpet-player-turned-writer moved to sitcom. 

A number of the sitcom writers I knew started out writing jokes for comedians.  I worked with several sitcom writers who had worked as joke writers on the late-night talk shows.  Some of these men and women had started out as stand-up comics themselves.

One writer I worked with was the son of a famous cartoonist.  Several writers with whom I worked were former actors.  I worked with a number of women writers that started out as secretaries on TV shows or for production companies.  One woman had been a page at NBC, showing people to their seats when they came for a taping.

I worked with a writer who got his start at the Harvard Lampoon.  Another came from advertising.  One writer was the brother of a Playboy Playmate.

In the early days of my career, some of the sitcom writers I worked with had a background in the New York theatre as playwrights or actors or just working in an office on Broadway.  Later, more and more writers came from cable TV.

The point of all of this is that over the course of my career I worked with and knew dozens of sitcom writers.  Everybody had a different story.  Almost every story was interesting.  But no two stories were alike.  I knew writers who started out as journalists or documentary film makers.  One woman was working in a post office on the east coast when she sent a spec script to a former college roommate who had gotten a job in Hollywood.  Several writers started out on children’s shows.

As I think about it now, years later, I may have been the only sitcom writer that I ever knew who started out actually wanting to be a sitcom writer.  Most of my colleagues seemed to have stumbled into sitcom from somewhere else.

Where do sitcom writers come from?  Everywhere.

There are no talent scouts.  There is no shortage of talented people in Hollywood.  Hollywood is not waiting for you to finish your spec script.  There is no line that you can stand in to sign up for a job on a sitcom staff.  There is no magic address to send your pilot or screenplay to.  There is no person at any studio or agency in Hollywood whose job is to read the scripts sent in by people that no one has ever heard of.  If one of those unsolicited scripts does get read before it’s thrown away, it’s because some receptionist or junior assistant got bored.

In my book, Elephant Bucks, I devote a sizeable chunk of Chapter Seven to offering suggestions on how you can get your Lucky Break in Hollywood.  But there are a thousand other ways to do it.  It’s up to you to figure out the way that works for you.